When operating on a commercial scale, process operations have to meet a number of important design criteria. In the modem day environment, process design has to take account of environmental legislation and keep to health and safety standards. Processes that utilize or produce dangerous chemicals pose particular problems and often, in order to minimize risks of explosion or reaction runaway, such process operations have to be run at conditions that are not optimal; this increases the running costs of a plant (the operational expenditure or OPEX). Such processes may also have to utilize more equipment than is necessary just to perform the process; this leads to an increase in building costs (the capital expenditure or CAPEX).
There is an on-going need to provide process operations that can reduce CAPEX and OPEX costs and particularly without increasing the risk of damage to the plant and danger to the public and/or to the process plant workers.